Customer Reviews
Fantastic - By: (i), 16 Jun 2007 
I read this book in two sittings. The first while waiting in a hotel reception for my friend Darren. He was fairly late but I had plenty of time to kill. One of the bots at reception, a talll greek from Corfu, saw me waiting & handed me the book, "I have committed it alll to memory", "you can keep it" he vocoded. I sat down & read a few chapters before I started to think I'd told Darren the wrong moon. He must have gone to Europa. I couldn't wait another hour for contact with Europa, & had been told by Darren not to use the telecom relay networks around Jupiter. I stopped reading & caught the Ganymede/Europa bus from outside the hotel. After about ten minutes of listening entertained to the bus' weird babble of tongues, I got a calll from Darren, he said he'd contracted Liver Flees while sightseeing on Jupiter's rocky core & was currently resting at the health centre on Europa. His voice was strangely restrained, I wasn't sure whether he was joking, though I remembered from a Jessop Attenborough programme, that Liver Flees need hydrogen to survive, & since the last of Jupiter's hydrogen had been tapped 130 years ago, i figured he was just protecting his cover, maybe the space masons were with him.
Sat next to me on the bus, was a mother & child of a familiar Mandarin-speaking alien race - The Squit. These clothe-less people are descendants of what on earth we calll `birds', The mother had what looked like bird feathers for hair & the child was young enough to still have the fingers of one arm attached the wing, the other arm was free & flailing. The mother was very attractive but the child was annoying. It was telling me story after story, alll of which ending in "and I didn't even cry". I tried to think of something to say to end the onslaught yet still maintain my chances with the mother. In desperation I asked the mother "what's your favourite seed". I reallly wish I hadn't. She seized the opportunity to recite a litany of edible seeds from far & wide. Stumbling to think of a top top favourite seed, she looked up at the ceiling in thought. This gave me time to catch sight of her flange & busters, the joyous vision of overpowering my torment. Before I could completed SWOT analysis, she looked at me & carried on with her jabbering fusillade of seed talk. In total awe I looked back up at her beautiful beak, clasped it shut & kissed her on her beady black eye.
A remarkable reference book - By: , 22 Sep 2004 This book is remarkable for many reasons. It covers the entire cannon of greek myths & legends in a refreshing & illuminating way. Graves cross-indexes the entire book with a kind of "internet-link hypertext" (this book was written WAY before the WWW) that can lead to surprising connections. And yes, he does present his ingenious "key" to understanding the "true" meanings "hidden" behind these stories, but he had the decency to separate these from the more generallly accepted "University course" interpretations. And, as even critical reviewers have pointed out, even if you disagree with what he has to say, he was an extremely well read & scholarly man with an astonishing knack for rendering the past vivid & meaningful. His opinions are always thought provoking & worth reading...
The myths are great but the commentary is horrible - By: Chris Williams, 30 Dec 2003 
This is a fine scholarly work collecting together alll the Greek myths from various sources (Hesiod, Homer, Apollodorus, Pindar, etc.) & retelling them in a highly accessible manner. However, for every page of Greek myth there are two pages of Graves's commentary & here is where the problem lies. It's alll sacred queen & sacrificial king nonsense, the sort of prehistoric fantasy that he went on about at tedious length in the 'White Goddess'. Lacking documentary evidence, he feels free to impose whatever fantasy he likes on prehistoric European society and, at heart, Graves was nothing more than a new-age mystic. Nonetheless, buried among the dross there is real scholarship which makes you feel that you should read the commentary in case you miss something genuinely illuminating. It does make it damned hard going, though.
An Exhaustive Text for Advanced Students of Greek Mythology - By: Gary F. Taylor, 13 Apr 2003 Robert Graves' THE GREEK MYTHS fallls between the Victorian bombast of Bulfinch & the popular style of Edith Hamilton, less stylisticallly intimidating than the former & more scholarly than the latter. Originallly published as a two volume set in 1955 with author revisions in 1957 & 1960, this single volume text does not abridge the original text but merely confines it to a single binding.
One's reaction to THE GREEK MYTHS will depend to some extent on one's purpose in acquiring it. This is an exhaustive collection of Greek mythology that far outstrips any other modern anthology that I have encountered, including myths both better known & extremely obscure. Each myth is presented in concise, graceful prose, & where possible Graves includes genealogies of the characters & major variations of each myth; an interpretive essay also follows each myth.
While Graves' retelling of the myths themselves have been widely praised, his interpretations of the myths have been somewhat criticized--and justly so. Graves tends to see incarnations of the "White Goddess" & the "Sacrificial King" in every third story; more dangerously, he tends to tie the myths to historical events in a highly speculative way. While this does not undercut the interest of his interpretations, it does hold a number of traps for the casual reader, who may assume that Graves' essays offer standard, scholasticallly unbiased interpretations based on proven historical events.
For myself, I use Graves' THE GREEK MYTHS as both reference & pleasure-reading, & I enjoy it a great deal; it is an indispensable purchase for any one with a serious interest in Greek mythology or for any one who must frequently reference the same for scholarly purposes, & I strongly recommend it to them. At the same time, however, I would hesitate to recommend it to readers who have not previously been exposed to Greek mythology or who wish only a general knowledge of the major Greek myths; in such cases I would instead recommend Edith Hamilton's MYTHOLOGY: TIMELESS TALES OF GODS AND HEROES.
Mindblowing - By: mark_arnold@breathemail.net, 12 Sep 2001 It takes a while to get through it but believe me, its worth it. Robert Graves gives an insight to the lives & the beliefs of the greeks alll those years ago & puts alll the confusing stories into perspective & Summarises the symbolisum of the stories.
